Bounded output‐feedback consensus‐based formation control of nonholonomic vehicles

Abstract

AbstractIn multi‐agent systems, most commonly, consensus consists in all agents converging to a common equilibrium point. For nonholonomic vehicles, which move on a Cartesian plane and occupy a physical space, it is more appropriate to speak of consensus‐based formation, which implies that the vehicles are required to converge to a relative position in a given formation while, distributively, agreeing on the center of such formation and on their orientation. In this paper we solve such a problem via a smooth, time‐varying, output‐feedback control; more precisely, without velocity measurements. In addition, and this is our main contribution, the controller is designed to satisfy pre‐imposed bounds to avoid input saturation. To the best of the authors' knowledge this is the first controller that solves the consensus‐based formation problem in networks of nonholonomic vehicles via a bounded, output‐feedback controller. The paper also provides a simulation comparison between our proposal and its unbounded counterpart.